How-to

At Proto-pasta we spend a lot of time understanding how our materials interact with different slicers and printers and by doing this we hope to help you achieve the best printing experience possible with the unique filaments we offer. We recently analyzed the Proto-pasta High Temp PLA profiles provided by Lulzbot available on Cura Lulzbot Edition to see how Proto-pasta HTPLA will print based on the pre-made settings. This blog is written to shine a light on how volume flow rate plays a significant role in printer capabilities as well as walk you through a brief explanation of the steps...

First time using Proto-Pasta Carbon Fiber HTPLA? Or maybe you've already discovered this excellent material and want to improve your printer's performance? It can be challenging, but with these tuning techniques and a little patience, you will be able to print stronger, more accurate, and precise parts. The typical consumer 3D printer is a very complicated process packaged in a friendly-looking machine. Although we wish that achieving the advertised results was as simple as just hit "print!" unfortunately, It's not :( What we are shown can be misleading because as soon as your printing experience doesn't go how you envisioned it, it's easy to give...

When suggesting Carbon Fiber as a 3D printing material, nozzle wear is often the first concern. While it's important to be aware of nozzle wear, don't let it stop you from enjoying the benefits of heat-treated Carbon Fiber HTPLA. In the following article, we'll show you how to identify, replace, and adapt your 3D printer's nozzle to changing conditions. By the way, you can absolutely use a stock, brass nozzle to print carbon fiber. It works! Will the nozzle wear more quickly than a harder, wear-resistant nozzle? Sure, so let's prepare you to replace your nozzle for printing with abrasive materials. Nozzle replacement doesn't have to be...

Why does a carbon fiber 3D print look so good? That color, texture, and sheen is hard to beat, but getting good results when 3D printing isn't always straight-forward. Our Prusa MK3 3D printer and HTPLA reliability blog is a great starting point for insight into getting more reliable 3D prints with Proto-pasta HTPLAs. Before tuning, we started with a fresh 0.4 mm wear-resistant nozzle for factory-like detail. For more about how to replacing your nozzle, consider our maintenance blog. With a fresh nozzle, we found a temperature of 255 deg C was required to overcome jamming at the start of a Prusa...

Carbon Fiber HTPLA can make very accurate parts particularly when heat treating, demonstrating less distortion of form and dimension change after heat treating compared to other HTPLAs. This characteristic is particularly useful when seeking to create application-specific parts where exceptional accuracy, high stiffness, or use up to 160 C is required. Above is an example of how well heat treated Carbon Fiber HTPLA (left) holds form compared to our opaque black HTPLA (right). Holes are round and surfaces are flat, straight, and true with Carbon Fiber. Standard HTPLA (right) shows significantly more distortion. Knowing heat treated CF parts can hold form opens up applications...